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The "New" Document Management
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Document management emerged since the early 1990’s as the technology to
automate and control the process of capture, creation, review/approval,
distribution/publication and archival of business documents. Since then, the document
management field has evolved into content management and/or knowledge management
and/or groupware (collaboration) -- as a result of the major shift to e-business from
organizations. Nowadays, document management is often just part of a bigger
solution:
• Content Management systems manage information flow from business
front-end systems (customer relation management – CRM - system, e-commerce, etc.)
to back-end systems (shipping system, warehouse management, enterprise resource
planning – ERP - system, etc.) The information flow includes documents, web pages,
records, etc. From many perspectives, content management is a natural progression
of document management, and in fact many document management system vendors have
become major players in the content management field.
• Knowledge Management (read more about Knowledge Management) systems
manage the intellectual asset of organizations. Documents are the medium where
most (if not all) organizations keep their explicit knowledge; hence document
management is naturally a part of knowledge management.
• Portal Collaboration technology provides a "one-stop shop" for sharing
information within an enterprise or a project group. Usually, documents are one of
the most common items to be shared; and hence, document management is often an
integrated part of portal collaboration.
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- "Nowadays, document management is often just part of a bigger solution..."
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Enterprises now often implement document management as part of the three
aforementioned larger business initiatives. However, document management is
also used by itself, especially in organizations that are (or strive for)
certain ISO compliance. Taken into a larger context involving the three fields
above, the modern document management system can consist of these features:
Document creation:
• Functionality to manually add documents into the system
• Integration with other technologies such as scanner, fax, MS-Office applications, etc. to help with document capture.
Document organization:
• Taxonomy classification to organize documents into various taxonomies for ease of retrieval and classification.
• Folders management to group documents under business-defined hierarchies.
Document distribution:
• Renditions allow converting of documents into the appropriate renditions (PDF, HTML, etc.) for publishing.
• Publishing feature to link document management system directly to web-site management systems.
Document routing:
• Workflow facilitates business processes for document creation, review/approval, etc.
• E-Signature completes the process of document review and approval.
Document retrieval:
• Browse through organization hierarchy.
• Search retrieves document through metadata and full-text index of documents.
Document life-cycle management:
• Version control tracks and manages different versions of a document.
• Check-in/out capability to protect document integrity from inconsistent updating.
• Records management to handle document archival.
Security and permission control:
• User and group management controls access to the system.
• Access Control List (ACL) per document to provide fine-grained permission control over each object.
Collaboration support:
• Task management is linked with document management to provide referenced documents for tasks.
• Discussion threads add context around created documents.
• On-line meeting is linked with document management to provide one-stop shop for meeting materials and meeting minutes.
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- "Enterprises now often implement document management as part of Content Management,
aforementioned larger business initiatives."
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Interested? Want to find out how you would go about implementing a Document
Management initiative? Contact us. Northern ATI members
have been involved with many document management projects. Our members are also
active researchers in this area. Our members have "been there, done that". We can
help you assess your document management needs, and/or help you design and
implement a successful document management program, from both a technology
perspective and change management perspective.
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